Instant Replay on the Battlefield

According to Live Science, the military may soon utilize a battlefield video system like the National Football League’s instant replay technology. The system would work by tagging individual frames of video with metadata like time, date, and location in order to help analysts get a quick sense of the relevance of each recording. Other pieces of data might include audio input from soldiers on the ground identifying people and structures captured on video. Why do this? Well:

In the past few years, the amount of intelligence and surveillance video coming in from robots and other sources has increased sharply, overwhelming analysts who simply can't keep up.

For instance, U.S. Air Force drones collected roughly 1,800 hours of video a month in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009, nearly three times as much video than in 2007, noted Howard Lance, chairman, president and CEO of Melbourne-Fla.-based Harris Corporation, which provides the NFL and Major League Baseball instant-replay technology.

This is only expected to grow as the number of robots increases on the battlefield, as do their capabilities - for example, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can record in 10 directions simultaneously.

Now Harris is helping the Pentagon with this information overload by helping devise a customized video analysis system that might cut the time needed to analyze trillions of bytes of video from weeks to minutes. After all, U.S. broadcasters handle 70,000 hours daily of video, Lance noted.